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Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: “The Justice of Punitive Wars” written by Benjamin Koons

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This essay received an Honourable Mention in the graduate category of the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics.

Written by University of Oxford, Oriel College student Benjamin Koons

  1. Introduction

Contemporary just war theory has largely abandoned punishment as one of the just causes for war, but I intend to show that if one accepts the justice of defensive wars then punitive wars are plausibly justified. I defend this thesis:

Punishment as Just Cause (PJC): It is a just cause for international treaty organization X to initiate a war with member-state Y so as to punish Y for an injustice against state Z.Read More »Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: “The Justice of Punitive Wars” written by Benjamin Koons

Does the desire to punish have any place in modern justice?

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Professor Neil Levy, visiting Leverhulme Lecturer, University of Oxford, has recently published a provocative essay at Aeon online magazine: Human beings are a punitive species. Perhaps because we are social animals, and require the cooperation of others to achieve our goals, we are strongly disposed to punish those who take advantage of us. Those who… Read More »Does the desire to punish have any place in modern justice?

Guest Post: Vampire Judges and Blood Money: Blood Donation as Criminal Sanction?

Written by Christopher Chew

Monash University

Early one September morning, plaintiffs at a rural Alabama County court in the US, were greeted with an unexpected and highly unusual offer. To quote presiding Judge Marvin Wiggins:

“There’s a blood drive outside, and if you don’t have any money, and you don’t want to go to jail, as an option to pay it, you can give blood today…bring in a receipt indicating you gave blood…as a discount rather than putting you in jail…or the sheriff has enough handcuffs for those who do not have money.”Read More »Guest Post: Vampire Judges and Blood Money: Blood Donation as Criminal Sanction?

Guest Post: Mental Health Disorders in Prison: Neuroethical and Societal Issues

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 Guest post by Barbara Sahakian, FMedSci, DSc, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, and president of the International Neuroethics Society. This article was originally published on the Dana Foundation Blog, and can be read here: http://danablog.org/2015/07/28/mental-health-disorders-in-prison-neuroethical-and-societal-issues/ More than half of all prison and jail inmates have a mental health problem.[i] In… Read More »Guest Post: Mental Health Disorders in Prison: Neuroethical and Societal Issues

Guest Post: Self defence and getting sacked

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Written by Dr Nicholas Shackel

Cardiff University

 

If you were attacked at a work party you would expect the person who attacked you to get sacked. In this case (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11846084/London-Zoo-love-rivals-in-vicious-fight-over-llama-keeper.html) it seems to be the person attacked who got sacked, apparently because the boss doesn’t understand the right of self defence.Read More »Guest Post: Self defence and getting sacked

Guest Post: Is it cruel to make children sit and work in silence?

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Written By David Aldridge, Oxford Brookes University

This is a cross post from Dave Aldridge’s blog

 

Ahead of a talk to be given at the Institute of Education, Tom Bennett, behaviour guru and figurehead of the ResearchEd movement, invited questions via twitter that he hoped he could address in his seminar.  One tweeter asked “Is it cruel to make [children] read/ write/ think in silence?”  Bennett’s response on twitter was a one word, “no”, accompanied by this picture of guffawing muppets.Read More »Guest Post: Is it cruel to make children sit and work in silence?

Guest Post: Why it might be good to pamper terrorists

Written By Anders Herlitz

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

 One of the most heated debates in “Western” countries these days concerns how to deal with individuals who either have traveled or consider traveling to Syria or Iraq in order to join Daesh and return to a “Western” country in which they are citizens. Australia recently announced that they plan to strip Australian-born individuals who fight with Daesh of their Australian citizenship. The United Kingdom already has laws that allow them to strip citizens of their British nationality if it is “conductive to the public good.” Sweden, my home country, gained international attention in somewhat suspicious circles for what to many seemed to be the complete opposite approach to the problem: the city of Stockholm has outlined a plan for how to deal with members of extremist movements, which involves what they call inclusive measures such as assistance with finding housing as well as an occupation, but also health efforts needed to deal with trauma and PTSD that are expected to be common among participants in warfare. Needless to say perhaps, the idea that Swedish tax money could go to treat the trauma of a person who himself decided to travel to a foreign country to participate in barbarism has generated quite an emotional reaction. I’d like to take this opportunity to scratch the surface of the ethical problems of this general problem, show why Stockholm did the right thing, and underline that we are having really, really bad moral luck.Read More »Guest Post: Why it might be good to pamper terrorists

Punishment and Memory

The public outcry at the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service that Lord Janner was not fit to stand trial for 22 sex offences, the last of which were allegedly committed in the 1980s, appears to have led the CPS to initiate a review. Janner’s case raises several issues about the punishment of crimes that may have taken place in the relatively distant past.Read More »Punishment and Memory

Should we punish crimes from the distant past?

Former Auschwitz SS officer Oskar Gröning is currently being tried as an accessory to murder for his role as an administrator in the extermination camp, and the trial has stirred up a lot of debate. One strand of the debate addresses the question whether Gröning was complicit in the extermination of prisoners, and whether he was culpable for this complicity. (Roger Crisp wrote a fascinating post on this a couple of weeks back.) But another strand – and the strand that I want to look at here – has addressed the question whether former Nazi war criminals should be tried and punished for deeds in their distant past. Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor and witness in Gröning’s trial has claimed that he shouldn’t be tried, though he should use his knowledge to help fight holocaust denial.

Let’s suppose that Gröning was indeed a culpable accomplice to murder. Should he then be punished? More generally, should serious crimes from decades go be punished? My intuition is that they should, but reflecting on why I have found it is not straightforward to defend this view.Read More »Should we punish crimes from the distant past?

The Indignity of Imprisonment

            Do we need to radically rethink the practice of imprisonment of criminals – not in the direction of novel forms of punishment, but rather in the form of vastly reducing punitive imprisonment altogether?  While prisons are integral to modern criminal justice system, a report from the British Academy earlier this month puts serious pressure on the institution.  Their overall argument is that we should move away from current levels of incarceration and focus on alternative responses to criminality like fines, rehabilitation programs and restorative justice.  Part of the report rehashes familiar empirical, consequentialist arguments for prison reform: prisons are expensive, they have deleterious effects on society, they have unclear deterrent effects, and so on.   Those arguments are relevant and important, but in this post I’d like to focus on the more theoretical, non-consequentialist arguments for prison reform.  The British Academy report argues that, in essence, current imprisonment practices are incompatible with the values of liberal democracy.  This is roughly in line with a growing body of philosophical literature militating against mass incarceration and other forms of punishment.  Here, I’ll go through some of the report’s arguments (and one of its weaknesses), as well as introduce an alternative account I’m developing that links up the imprisonment debate with the torture debate and emphasizes a respect for dignity and humanity. Read More »The Indignity of Imprisonment